Fashion Photography

“Many photographers feel their client is the subject,” the fashion photographer Irving Penn once said. “My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader.” Through magazine covers and advertising campaigns, fashion photographers have cultivated each generation’s fantasy of style, glamour, and beauty. In the past decade, a rise of museum exhibitions have spotlighted the influence and importance of fashion photography, such as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles’s feature on Herb Ritts in 2012, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s retrospective of Horst P. Horst in 2014, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show of Irving Penn in 2017. Below, discover fashion photographs …